Donald Trump has spent two consecutive days being so vile that reporters are struggling to keep track of individual incidents. This has overshadowed the continued malevolence of his surrogates, many of whom are either among the stupidest people to grace our television airwaves or the most dishonest—as always, the lines are blurred.
Trump spokesperson Katrina Pearson did not, apparently, get the campaign memo urging surrogates to perhaps stop saying horrible things about the Khan family and their son, U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 while serving in Iraq. She took to news shoutlet CNN to spin a new tale.
Pearson: It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagement that probably cost [Capt. Khan] his life. So I don't understand why it's so hard to understand why Donald Trump was confused about why he was being held responsible for something he had nothing to do with while Hillary Clinton had everything to do with.
Wolf Blitzer: Katrina Pearson, as usual, thanks so much for joining us.
Capt. Humayun Khan was killed in Iraq in 2004. This would be four years before Barack Obama ever took office, and five years before Hillary Clinton became U.S. Secretary of State, observations that CNN host Wolf Blitzer did not choose to offer.
Trump himself is not eager to let the moment pass. He offered up his thoughts again tonight on Fox News, during another Bill O'Reilly interview. Khizr Khan, O'Reilly offered, "was obviously hired by the Clinton campaign" to "go after" Trump.
It is dark times, in the Trump camp. He has turned to another commonplace conservative conspiracy theory now, the one promoted by Republican governors seeking to put each new round of restrictions on the right of even non-white Americans to vote.
“If the election is rigged, I would not be surprised,” Trump told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development. We may have people vote 10 times.”
Those comments followed Trump’s Monday claim, to an Ohio audience, that “the election is going to be rigged.” That same day, in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, he beseeched Republicans to start “watching closely” or the election would be “taken away from us” through fraud.
Donald Trump is not, for all our mockery of his incoherent anger, living in his own alternate reality. It is one that has been crafted carefully and ceaselessly, by the party’s restless base, long before he ever took the stage; he merely dipped his toes in, then his ankles, and now claims it as his own. It is the conservative reality in which Barack Obama was president in 2004, and there can be no such thing as a patriotic Muslim father, only someone hired to play the part, and the bright orange racist cannot lose this next election—it can only be stolen from him. Stolen, specifically, by minority voters casting illegitimate votes. Trump invented none of this. He merely grasped the paranoias of the conservative base, and wrapped himself in their desires, and declared himself their king.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—Another blow against administration secrecy:
A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to release the names of those arrested and detained in its 9/11 investigation. This order will likely get appealed, but it is further evidence that the courts are stripping the Bush Administration of the extraordinary powers it seized in the wake of the terrorist attacks.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin says polling season (and #NeverTrump season) begins in earnest now. Conservatives set Trump up to destroy not just the Gop, but conservatism. Federal courts have been dying to lend them a hand. Why they’re now free to do so.
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